Cost
Pricing
- Can be Enterprise, Web Direct or Cloud Solution Provider (CSP)
- Most inbound data transfers are free. Outbound data transfers are by zone
- Some typical VM Resource Meters include:
- Compute, IP hours
- Data Transfer In/Out (network)
- IO: Standard Disk, IO, Blob {Read,Write,Delete}
- Other ways to minimize cost
- Set spending limits
- Use Azure credits available to Visual Studio subscribers
- Using hybrid of reserved instances with pay-as-you-go
- choose low cost regions, locations
- Use Hybrid Licensing or BYOL to reduce OS, Database licensing costs
Cost Management
- compute: charged by: Size, Instance family, OS, Region, Time in use (rounded to second)
- Services pricing based on VM: VM Scale sets, Azure Batch, Service Fabric, Azure Kubernetes Service
- App Service has it's own Azure Compute Unit but is based on VM
- Functions are charged per execution + CPU time (after free quota)
- networking: VNet and subnets themselves are free
- Public IP
- NAT rules are free
- Egress beyond 5GB/month
- data transfer between regions
- Load balancer (level 4):
- basic is free
- standard: 18\(/first rule/month, 7\)/month/2+ rules
- Application Gateway: dedicated instance cost per hour + network usage
- Network Gateway: dedicate instance cost per hour + network usage charged for both, incoming and outgoing
- storage: charges for space + access.
- files: LRS ~1.84 cents/GB/month, GRS = 2 LRS, RA-GRS = 2.5 LRS
- tiers: Hot 1.84, cool 1.0, archive 0.2, premium 18.0
- archive is cheaper to store and expensive to access
- SQL Server (IaaS) and SQL Database (PaaS)
- IaaS: VM cost + licensing cost. Usually licensing cost > VM cost
- If license is Enterprise, cost might lower due to Hybrid Licensing
- IaaS: developer licenses are free, use them in non-prod environment
- PaaS: two pricing models
- vCore: based on # of CPUs + storage. e.g. 4 vCore = $1500+storage
- DTU: Performance based pricing model (CPU+Storage prepackaged)
- Cosmos DB: pricing for provisioned throughput
- $5.84/month/database in single region @ 100 requests/second
- Azure reservations:
- discount if committing for 1 or 3 year contract. 1 year is ~29%, 3 year is 49% savings
- SQL Database, Cosmos DB, Synapse Analytics (SQL DWH), Azure database for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB
Portal
- Pricing calculator: provides an estimate of resources
- Total Cost of Ownership TCO calculations
- Create a workload by entering on-prem resources including electricity and labor costs
- calculates savings based on Azure in 5 years
- Cost Analysis within Cost Management portal shows detail costs by resources, period etc
- Large customers (500+) get a discounted prices if they have Enterprise Agreement
- Separate portal
ea.azure.com
- Additional cost segmentation like departments, accounts, business divisions etc
- Consumption API is REST API for obtaining cost data
- Portal allows you to access, visualize and manage AWS costs @ 1% of AWS costs
- Cloudyn is a new service that can run cost reports across all 3 cloud providers
- Budget can be scoped at Subscription or to Resource Group level
- can send out Alerts using Action Group
- Action can consists of: Email/SMS/Call, Email to Azure Resource Manager Role, Function, Webhook, LogicApp, ITSM, Runbook
Controlling costs
- Use Azure Monitor to watch for under-utilized VMs and other services
- Build a baseline cost
Azure Advisor
- Advises to reduce costs by
- identifying un-provisioned ExpressRoutes
- suggesting reserved instances v/s pay-as-you-go
- right-sizing or shutting down underutilized VM (CPU < 5% or Network < 7MB in 14 days)
- Besides cost savings, it provides recommendations for HA, Security and Performance
- Azure Cost Management is another service that shows historical spend
- Cloudyn, a MS subsidiary, allows tracking usage, cost across all major cloud providers
- TCO Calculator which estimates cost savings by comparing on-prem resources with cloud
- servers, databases, storage and networking are high-level groups